


The Flow of Fate

by OfWolvesAndDragons



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Blood and Violence, Historical References, M/M, Near Death, Post-Apocalypse, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Vampires, xiubaek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 11:04:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13996938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfWolvesAndDragons/pseuds/OfWolvesAndDragons
Summary: What if amidst the span of eternity, all you ever had was something that should never have been?





	The Flow of Fate

**Author's Note:**

> A small March ficlet for Xiumin’s birthday month - with a prompt given by my dear friend. She chose vampires. 

Xiumin sees him for the first time in the depths of the 16th century. A figure in white stepping delicately through the rubble of the streets of Hanseong. It is the singular, first memory Xiumin has of him, caged in swirling dust and the screams of dying soldiers as the Japanese army push their invasion further into the heart of Korea. It’s a cold, blustering evening set at the start of what would become June and Xiumin distinctly remembers the surprise on the man’s face as he walks past and glances his way.

Xiumin is prone at the time, blood seeping from the deep wounds in his neck as the creatures feed on him. He’s young but not stupid. He’ll die here; on the steps of his father’s house as the bodies of his family lie inside, all three killed by his own hand as the infection set in.

Xiumin distinctly remembers the surprise because of how it changed the man’s face into something ethereal for a precious moment. He seemed… astonished that Xiumin was looking _at_ him.

Sharp teeth tear at the muscle on his shoulder and Xiumin recalls crying out, one hand extended jerkily towards the stranger, fingers curling into a plea. Surely he wouldn’t _leave_ him here?

Xiumin remembers the pained hesitation. Then the first step the man takes in his direction right before he passes out from the blood loss.

~*~

Xiumin sees him again only once during the 17th century. The Renaissance has captured most of Europe in its glittery, bedecked fingers as the modern age tumbles into being and erases the darker century before. Only Vienna still sits shrouded in misery as the bubonic plague rips through the streets and alleyways of the city.

Crowded and densely built, there is truly nowhere to go to escape the contagion. Xiumin remembers stepping out of a hospital and dodging a couple of infected rats, tucking a vial of blood-heavy leeches discreetly into his coat pocket. The epidemic had been crippling the city and as he holds a small white cloth over his nose, he just so happens to use his free hand to prop open the heavy door for the person making their way in the opposite direction.

Xiumin raises his eyes as the white of the man’s clothing catches his eye and he recalls being shocked into silence as the figure brushes past. Surely it wasn’t the same.... More than a hundred years had passed. By then Xiumin was no longer the doomed boy on the steps.

The barest flick of the man’s eyes betrays that he too sees Xiumin before he whisks past and disappears into the bowels of the hospital. By the time Xiumin overcomes his shock and yanks the door back open to follow him, the man is nowhere in sight. Xiumin remembers searching every room.

Three patients died that afternoon.

~*~

The industrial revolution brought machines and smoke and even more soot to an already overcrowded, dirty city in the 19th century. Queen Victoria reigned from her bejewelled throne as the first age without a major epidemic dropped the mortality rate in London for the first time. At least for those in the upper classes who enjoyed the trappings of the Victorian era more so than those filling the gutters.

Xiumin had never truly forgotten the figure in white as the years melded into decades and the decades into even more centuries but each time he thought he saw a flash of white at the end of a street or around a corner in a crowded ballroom be was sorely mistaken. The figure passed from living memory into something he had… not dwelled on for some time.

Until the wintery night when he alights from a carriage along the Thames on a whim and decides to walk the rest of the way home. His driver is dismissed and Xiumin remembers enjoying the first snowfall of the season as his boots carried him down the long stretch of river. There’s so _much_ white that he almost misses the scuffle down near the docks below.

He recalls the two men struggling with a bundle in a sack, squirming and wriggling like a gigantic hessian caterpillar as they heave it up and over the low railing. An entirely non-human yelp sounds out as the sack hits the dirty water. Xiumin remembers he would have kept walking if not for that. If it were just a body being dumped he would have passed by without a second glance, but that sound…

Xiumin rolls his eyes and hooks a satin glove onto the slippery brickwork, vaulting over and dropping down behind the two men. He remembers them turning at the sound of him hefting a thick plank of driftwood, only to have their skulls caved in with it. They drop and Xiumin leisurely licks the blood splatter off his lips.

He uses the thin end of the wood to hook the sack and tug it back towards the dock. The rope is easily unwound and Xiumin is nearly bowled over by the contents as they scramble out. Eight legs and far too much tail.

Every animal Xiumin had ever come across in his unnaturally long existence growled and hissed and spat like they just _knew_ what he was. Of course they did. Animals were always cleverer than humans in that regard. These two bulldogs however, would come to loyally stay by his side until they passed many years later. It probably helped that they were blind. He loved them fiercely in his own way.

The day he buried the second next to the first he remembers seeing the figure pass between two tall headstones adorned with crumbling gargoyles. The man clicks his fingers as he does and while Xiumin had stopped believing in angels the day he himself had risen as a monster, he swears he sees the shadow of two tiny figures darting after the man, ghostly and overjoyed.

~*~

The first Great War of the 20th century was supposed to be the worst that mankind could ever bring itself to become. Xiumin remembers the whisperings of the War to End All Wars, only to find twenty years later that humans were indeed dumb enough to not learn from their mistakes. Or doomed to repeat them.

It’s the second last time he remembers seeing the figure. Crouched over the body of a soldier crying for his mother, Xiumin is too busy administering medical aid amid the shelling to catch him at first. But when he looks up, helmet nearly falling off his sweaty head, he sees the familiar flick of coat unstained and unsullied by the explosions around the trenches.

A shell lands far too close to comfort and Xiumin ducks as it explodes, clutching the IV line that feeds into the soldier below him. He screams for a stretcher and by the time he glances up through the falling dirt he only catches the figure as he appears again near the enemy lines, tapping one finger on the lip of a mortar. The weapon falls silent and it allows the fraction of a second’s grace for the rest of his unit to break cover and join him, lifting the dying soldier onto a makeshift stretch of cloth.

Xiumin stows one of the spare blood bags under his jacket and glances back over his shoulder as he follows them. The man in white is watching.

Xiumin slides down into the trench and tucks himself into a corner as the shelling resumes, ripping open the bag and sucking on one corner.

~*~

The last time they crossed paths was the most memorable.

The hunter was fast. Xiumin, dangerously sluggish from the severe lack of blood in the weeks leading up to the ambush and the abruptness of being so rudely awoken, barely holds his own. He had thought the subway station to be abandoned but somehow she had tracked him there. Xiumin would have almost admired the cleverness if he weren’t forced into fighting for his life.

Moonlight, he remembers, slides through the cracks in the dilapidated ceiling as he ducks behind a pillar and crouches down, the bullets cracking shards off the metal. Its blessed ammo, he knows that much. A priest was somewhat hard to find in those days, more so than they ever used to be. Religion, along with many other things was a slowly dying art. But then again Xiumin had never intended to make it to the 21st century so he made a habit of not being particularly surprised by anything anymore.

He keeps remembering the moonlight in particular; it glitters off the broken shard of bottle he snatches up in his mad scramble to avoid being shot. He leaves no reflection in its surface but it was sharp in his fatigue-shaking hand and would be the most useful item on the whole platform.

The tip of the green glass catches the barest wink of white fabric as Xiumin glances around the pillar and it breaks his attention enough for the hunter to stalk around the other side and grab him by the hair, yanking his head right back. She raises her weapon and takes aim at his throat.

The arterial blood is a warm and blessed relief as Xiumin shoves the shard up the side of her thigh’s femoral, straight from knee to groin.  He recalls not caring for the first time in a long time that she was human; his hunger is so, so great in the presence of fresh blood. It shakes him from head to foot. He kicks her dropped weapon away and scrambles back from her convulsing body as she clutches at her leg, futilely trying to stem the flow.

He remembers it took about five minutes for her to die. By the time she’s finally whimpering her last he’s a huddled figure in the spiderwebbed corner, squeezing his arms around his upraised knees in an effort to physically hold himself back. He would find a blood bank, Xiumin distinctly remembers thinking, trying to remind himself of how he had survived untracked for so long until the world came to know and accept of the existence of the preternatural. He’s always managed before. Before the world turned into chaos.

He’s mere seconds away from giving in, listening to her slowing breaths when he feels something brush his hands. Xiumin glances up.

The figure had been there, not a memory or a ghost of an illusion, but real and tall as Xiumin once recalled him being in a time before time. He crouches at the side of the hunter and touches a fingertip to her forehead. Her last breath is peaceful.

Xiumin, exhausted and starving, has for once not the energy to mind his manners or care.

“Who are you?”

The figure takes a long, thoughtful breath, still crouched on one knee. Unaccustomed to being asked questions, Xiumin recalled thinking through the haze of hunger. Finally though, after a pained deliberation the man decides to speak.

“Who do you think I am?”

The voice is soft and gentle but Xiumin rolls his eyes at the obtuse answer and his frustration is enough to push him to his feet. He wobbles, dusting off his leather jacket in an effort to look nonchalant. “An angel?”

The man’s laugh had been bitter. Too bitter for such a beautiful face. “Some call me that.”

Xiumin recalls him turning away, as if that mere conversation had been too much. A mistake. It had made him stagger forward a few steps as the figure drops onto the tracks in a flutter of coat and begins walking along. Xiumin’s words tumble out too fast.

“You saved my life. Centuries ago. I know you remember that.”

The man pauses and Xiumin can see the side of his face in the moonlight as he half turns. He looks like he could say a million different things but he finally settles on one.

“I wasn’t supposed to.”

Xiumin sinks back against a nearby pillar. The figure makes it almost out of sight before Xiumin finds the courage to call out, hurried and with too many mixed emotions. This man is the only familiar thing to Xiumin. The one, singular constant in everything that has ever been and ever will be in his many days.

“When will I see you again?”

The man doesn’t stop walking. “When I have no more work to do.”

Xiumin doesn’t see him again as the world descends into the coming apocalypse. He expects it’s because he’s so fucking busy with humanity’s intense desire to extinguish itself. At least some things never change. The final newspaper ever printed reads only four words.

 _The End Is Nigh_.

~*~

The flickering holographic projections of twisting, neon women fill the ramshackle alleyways as it rains, distorted through the drizzle. Xiumin pushes through the throng of stragglers at this ungodly hour before dawn. The dehydrated plasma capsules had cost almost the last of his denominations but it’ll last him the rest of the month. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t replenish his credit rating; work was hard to find but sometimes employers asked no questions and paid up front. This Xiumin had learned at the start of the 23rd century and it still applies now. Mercenaries and shotgun muscle were always in demand as the scraps of warring factions crawled over the remains of the earth like roaches. At least the moonlight never changed.

The ramshackle room he had carved out as his own over the top of a dilapidated store is blissfully silent and away from the main part of the ruins of Seoul. Xiumin figures it’s poetic to be back here after all this time; to come full circle and see out the end of the world in the place where he watched his portion of it all begin. He couldn’t tell you the street where his family’s house had once stood but he figures he’d not want to know anyway. The history websites that were rewritten and edited somewhere when the internet had been a thing that worked and connected people, had called Hanseong the origin of the blood-borne viruses. The epicentre.

The earliest creatures infected with porphyric haemophilia there were mad with it and had killed nearly every one of their victims, naturally limiting the spread of the disease, but some of their would-be kills had… survived. Becoming the first of what the world would come to label as vampires. Xiumin dumps his bag of capsules on the low table and deliberately doesn’t think about the figure. About how he hesitated and stepped in. For him.

The rain batters the shutter on the singular window in the small room and Xiumin navigates around the dirty mattress on the floor to tighten it. He can see through the rain-smeared glass the latest four-dimensional advert for the pods to take people off-world if you have the denominations and the desire to live out your endless days on the gloriously perfect space station that orbits the extinguished planet, free from disease and death and all the rest of life’s petty inconveniences. Almost all of humanity that can afford it has done so. Xiumin draws the blinds.

He’ll see out his days on the shell this earth has become. He was born here. He’ll… well, Xiumin figures one day he’ll die here. Whenever the hell that ends up being. He’s been good at avoiding that particular part so far.

When he turns around though, he very nearly falls face-first onto the mattress. The most familiar figure in his life is standing in the doorway Xiumin is _damn_ sure he closed behind him when he came in. After not laying eyes on that face for the longest of times, Xiumin is caught off guard by the rush of peculiar emotion that punches him square in the chest. Happiness?

The man looks… exhausted. Xiumin expects this is the strangest thing he’s ever done, but he doesn’t let himself think about it or he’ll back out. He steps around the mattress and holds out a hand.

“Sit down before you fall down.”

The man nods, deliberately avoiding the offered hand, staggering over until he can sink onto the mattress. Xiumin, at a loss for the first time in what feels like forever, drops his arm and hovers. The man seems to think for a moment and then topples gently sideways, flopping onto the pillow in a move so graceless that Xiumin almost laughs.

He can’t remember the last time he did that either. So Xiumin collects himself and tugs a blanket off the side of the armchair and drapes it over the figure, almost afraid that he’ll smear the pristine white clothing in the process. He steps back after he’s done and kind of… hovers.

The armchair is threadbare but Xiumin has slept on stones and in mansions so he’s not fussed. He sits on it and hunches forward, hands clasped. The beautiful man in his bed sleeps the entire night and the following day. Xiumin doesn’t move. He’s a little afraid that if he does the figure will disappear.

~*~

The figure wakes on the second day. He blinks against the lamplight and sits up slowly. Xiumin straightens in the chair and finally stands, snagging his capsules and downing several of them with whatever out of date beer he has on the bench. That seems to amuse the other man.

“Did you watch over me all this time?”

Xiumin scowls to hide his flush as he metabolises the blood at great speed and his body decides to use it for useless things like pigmenting his cheeks and ears. He dumps the warm bottle back on the tabletop.

“Why are you here?”

The man ducks his head, looking down at a pair of hands that Xiumin can see are fine-boned and delicate. Something an artist in Florence would have once been proud of. He’s pretty sure it’s a smoking crater now.

“I’ve nearly finished my work. I was… very tired.”

Xiumin crosses back to the armchair and stands in front of it. Sitting on his old mattress the man in white looks so, _so_ small all of a sudden. Almost human. Xiumin feels as if for the very first time, the figure might actually be present in the moment instead of slipping through it at the corner of Xiumin’s gaze. His words are selfish but to hell with pride; the world is dead.

“Will you stay?”

The man looks surprised. It has been so incredibly long since Xiumin saw that expression and it’s identical to his first memory. As stunning and angelic as he originally recalls.

The man nods slowly. “I can take a break.”

Xiumin’s legs give out rather abruptly and he drops into the chair again, relief at the answer overwhelmingly unexpected. For the first time in forever he is not alone. He gathers himself and tries to resemble the stable, proud creature he once was but honestly there’s no one left to impress, no more balls to attend, no more wars to fight, no more days to count between seasons, between years, between centuries…

The figure stands and comes over, kneeling down in front of Xiumin.

“You asked me once who I was.” Those delicate hands clench but don’t touch, hovering just out of reach. “Do you know yet?”

Xiumin nods, his head dropping heavy. “You’ve had many names.”

The man ducks his head to one side, trying to catch Xiumin’s eye and the move is so impossibly cute for such a being that Xiumin almost wants to commit it to memory. Nothing is cute any more. Or pretty. Or innocent. The man smiles when Xiumin finally looks at him again.

“Who am I?”

Xiumin exhales. He’s known for such a long time now.

“Death.”

The figure in white smiles, breathtaking and gentle. “I don’t know why you could see me. I never did.”

Xiumin lets himself drop back against the high rest of the chair. “You weren’t supposed to save me.” He recalls the words as if they were yesterday. They have so many yesterdays between the two of them. Immortals that they are.

The smile dims, brightness to warmth. Melancholy. “I shouldn’t have done it. It’s forbidden to change the flow of fate.”

“But you did.” Xiumin aches to reach out and lay a hand on that shoulder, surprising himself in the process. But he keeps his hands to himself; touching death is an exercise in stupidity. Now he knows for certain why the other man had been avoiding contact. Of course.

“I don’t regret it.” The other man pushes himself to his feet, rocking backwards in one elegant move. “It’s been… nice to have a companion through time. Someone who saw me. Knew I was there, even if we only crossed paths by chance every now and then.”

Xiumin blinks. Is that what they were? Has he somehow been… passing friends with a lonely death? There’s certainly been stranger things to think of since the world went to hell in a handbasket. Xiumin refocusses on the room and the figure is now by the window. He pieces things together slowly but it all makes sense now, like a gruesome puzzle.

“You were working hard... Because the world was dying.”

The man nods at the window, flicking open the curtain. The advert reflects off his perfect features, highlighting his cheekbones. “I was, for a time. But things have slowed down now.”

The pods. The space station. Xiumin finally understands. “Have humans made you a little irrelevant with their technology?” He can’t hide the teasing tone and it’s more than a little surreal because the other man smiles.

“A little. So I thought I would spend my vacation here.”

Xiumin chokes.

~*~

By the fourth day Xiumin can’t take it anymore. One particular thing is tugging at him like an errant thread.

“I can’t refer to you as death. I just… pick a name. Anything. I don’t care. I need something to call you.”

The figure slants him an amused look. “I’m not going to wander off like some kind of stray. You won’t need to call for me.”

Xiumin grits his teeth. “Please. Just… try.”

~*~

The fifth day has Xiumin thinking death actually _has_ wondered off and it results in a mad scramble around the dilapidated shopfront until he skids to a stop near the filthy stream that carries old trash down past the block. Xiumin squints.

The figure is sitting watching a knot of scrawny, stray puppies wrestling with scraps. They bark at each other in their play and for a singular moment there’s still a spark of joy in the wreckage of this city because Xiumin sees death mouthing along with the sounds, forming silent noises that look like they begin with B. He’s scratching something in the dirt beside him.

Xiumin rolls his eyes at himself, at death and at the entire broken world because he’s somehow fallen into a parallel universe where everything has gone insane. He returns to his room, cross at himself for worrying in the first place and pretends he wasn’t out looking like a mother hen until said figure wanders back in around midnight and hesitantly supplies,

“Baekhyun?”

Xiumin’s reply is instantaneous. “Perfect.”

~*~

Baekhyun truly does disappear for a day when an earthquake hits three weeks later; the tectonic plates disrupted by the warheads trying to resettle themselves. He returns the following night and Xiumin figures even death can truly be over his job when he’s had to reap almost the entire planet within a certain short span of time.

Xiumin makes room for him on the mattress and stuffs a line of rolled up-sheet between them so they don’t touch during the night. Baekhyun curls up under the covers in a white ball and Xiumin has long since given up counting the weird.

~*~

The final designated weeks of evacuation onto the last of the pods are madness. Everyone with a shred of hope is willing to kill to scrape together enough denomination to land them a spot. Xiumin raids the blood capsule storage facility and loots as much plasma as he can carry while the owner is strangling the neighbour over the change in her pockets.

He makes it back without getting jumped more than once. Rationing the supplies, he figures he has a good month before he has to go looking again. Baekhyun hovers at his shoulder, counting too.

“There’s a blood bank still partially stocked in Switzerland. It was heavily fortified to withstand natural disasters so some of it should still be intact. We could go.”

Xiumin shakes his head. “This is fine for now.”

Baekhyun looks torn and Xiumin comes to the very abrupt realisation that he might just be the singular creature that Baekhyun _doesn’t_ want to see die. The last of his kind. Of nearly all kinds. It warms him in a way the borrowed blood never has.

~*~

The sun has hidden itself just below the hazy horizon line when Baekhyun finds him up on the crumbling tin roof, lying against the corrugations and smoking.

“Those things will kill you.”

Xiumin flicks the short butt at him. “Did you wait a thousand years to be able to make that lame joke?”

Baekhyun looks hurt. “It was lame?”

“Oh jeez.” Xiumin laughs. “You’re such an idiot. Come here.”

He reaches for Baekhyun and the other man immediately grabs his wrist in reflex, stopping him. And then realises exactly what he’s done. The pain in Baekhyun’s eyes is immeasurable and he jerks bodily back, horror filling his features. He’s touched Xiumin.

Xiumin… smiles. It feels like letting go of the biggest secret, even if he only figured it out a few days prior. He waits for Baekhyun to work through his heart attack and then reaches out again, cupping the side of his face. “Did you understand yet?”

Baekhyun’s breaths are heavy, panic-filled. His eyes are huge. Xiumin thinks he might just have gone into shock. How ironic.

“Look at me. I’m still here.” Behind them the final pod lifts off, curving an arc through the atmosphere heavy with noxious gasses and a nuclear winter slowly blowing in from China. Gunshots sound out in a couple of places, muffled and self-inflicted as humanity’s final escape disappears amid the stars and some of those left behind are unable to cope.

Baekhyun trembles and Xiumin would laugh at him if he didn’t feel so fond. He reaches out and gathers Baekhyun into his arms and he’s suddenly being bodily clung onto, arms and legs wound around him like a limpet. Baekhyun clutches him close like something precious and doesn’t let go until dawn forces them back inside.

Xiumin doesn’t protest. He expects the first time being able to truly touch someone in the span of all eternity is more than a little overwhelming. Even if that person has to technically already be dead for you to manage it. He doesn’t stop smiling for a while, feeling ever so clever for having realised the one point they were both the thickest of immortals for not figuring out sooner.

~*~

“Tell me everything.” Baekhyun asks one afternoon, winding his fingers between Xiumin’s. Trees are no longer a thing but grass still manages to scrape together enough nutrients from the cooling soil below to poke up in ugly patches. They’re sitting perched on one such plot as the first ash starts to fall.

Xiumin doesn’t understand at first. “Everything what?”

“Everything I missed.”

So Xiumin tells him about skipping stones in Hanseong, of running down the Champs-Élysées in spring, of feeling the salt air on his face as he recklessly commandeered a sailing vessel and traded with anyone in the Caribbean who would give him safe harbor, of nights reading maps and scrolls that glorified Napoleon’s push into Russia even as the ice closed in and he neared defeat, of lights and sounds and black and white television, of spies and soldiers and wars and moonlight; of everything Baekhyun missed while he was busy. Xiumin recounts moonlight the most.

~*~

It takes time but eventually the thick fallout obscures the moon enough that Xiumin distinctly takes note the final time he sees it, trying desperately to press it into memory like the flowers of old.

Baekhyun calls him up into the little room they share and tugs him over to the window to watch, positioning him so he can see and wrapping him up from behind, arms bracing tight and secure. His voice is sad. The final plasma capsules from his bag sit heavy in Xiumin’s stomach and he holds onto Baekhyun familiar arms, anchoring himself. It takes only an hour.

Baekhyun kisses him that night as he cries, wasting precious blood in pink tears. Xiumin loves him -has always loved him he realises- more fiercely than he can ever remember feeling any emotion. The end of the world never felt safer.

~*~

Xiumin rations the last of the capsules he finds discarded in the dusty corners of the storage facility and doesn’t tell Baekhyun. He doesn’t want him to worry. Baekhyun finds out anyway. Xiumin can tell from the way he kisses him and he tries not to let himself break apart from the tenderness.

~*~

Xiumin always thought he would finish his overextended time on this planet in this one, singular city. That had been the plan. It had seemed fitting. Right, in a way. He remembers thinking these clever things ever since the first bombs fell and he caught the last ship that ever had the fuel to cross the waters back to the island of his childhood. But now…

Baekhyun looks worried, like his sudden request would be ignored in lieu of what had once been Xiumin’s grand plan. But the capsules had run out three weeks prior and Xiumin was rethinking his once-desire to lie down for a last, long sleep. Baekhyun’s words echo around the dilapidated, broken buildings as they stand alone outside the shop. He repeats them again, a note of pleading creeping in. He doesn’t want Xiumin to starve to death. The constant rain of dust looks vaguely like a halo against his hair.

“Come with me. I still have a little work left.”

Xiumin manages a small, tired smile. Walking up the street had been an effort for the last couple of days but he had been determined to show Baekhyun what he remembered of the ruins. “Isn’t this tampering with the flow of fate again?”

Baekhyun huffs a laugh, relieved and fond in equal measure. “Not if there’s no one around to know any more.”

Xiumin expects that is what amounts to a perfect answer. He likes it. And so he turns away from the storefront and the little room upstairs, from the threadbare armchair and the dirty mattress and the window with the shutter that never closes properly. Nothing in there matters anyway; he has no need to see it one last time. All he needs is out here, wading through the thickset ash.

Baekhyun tucks an arm around Xiumin’s waist to support his steps. Xiumin presses a kiss against the side of his neck, grateful and more than a little adoring. That earns him a happy hum and a squeeze.

~*~

Switzerland as it turns out, is upwind enough of the fallout that the moon is still visible there.

~*~


End file.
